Motivated by the physics of quark-gluon plasma, calculations of time-dependent processes based on the AdS/CFT correspondence have lead to the notion that relativistic hydrodynamics may be useful for a much wider set of states than
usually assumed. This is based on the observation of universal, attractor-like behaviour quite far from local equilibrium. I will describe recent attempts to understand such behaviour in the case of N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma.